Otherlands

Starred review from January 24, 2022
Evolutionary biologist Halliday takes an energizing spin through Earth’s past in his magnificent debut. Calling this “a naturalist’s travel book,” Halliday takes readers from the dry flatlands of Pleistocene Alaska, where “short willows write wordless calligraphy on the wind with flourished ink-brush catkins,” to the Ediacaran skies, more than 500 million years ago, when even the stars were different. Along the way, he introduces myriad strange organisms: there’s an enormous goose from Miocene-era Italy; Cretaceous China’s winged reptile; the squidlike Tully Monster of the Carboniferous seas; and the wormy Hallucigenia found in Cambrian water. Halliday concludes in the present, cautioning that “there is no corner of the Earth where have not touched the way of life of its inhabitants in some way” but also asserting that humanity can “find the routes that avert disaster” in the future. The prose is stunning, and the author packs the narrative with geological, meteorological, and biological insights, turning dry history into something fascinating; for instance, the glass sponge reefs of the Jurassic period are “the largest biological structures ever to have existed,” “three times the length of the Great Barrier Reef.” This show-stopping work deserves wide readership.

Starred review from February 1, 2022

Paleobiologist and evolutionary biologist Halliday (Univ. of Birmingham) takes readers on a compelling voyage through ancient landscapes. He works backward through the fossil record, beginning with the most recent ice age at end-Pleistocene to the emergence of multicellular creatures over 550 million years ago. Organized around 16 fossil sites, each chapter explores a general theme (e.g., Earth's cycles, humans' first appearance, etc.); maps charting the planet's physical changes lead off each section, and drawings highlight some extinct species. The book was conceived as a "naturalist's travel book" and employs a style that has been aptly described as "lyrical"--which is remarkable given the book's deeply rooted research (virtually every paragraph has a supporting footnote). Fantastic flora and fauna abound, and Halliday stages unforgettable scenes such as the Miocene's mile-high waterfall as the eastern Mediterranean fills, or under-sea tectonic plate movements as sensed by Jurassic-period ammonites. Along the way, readers cannot fail but notice unsettling similarities between doomed ecosystems of the distant past and current environmental crises. In an epilogue, the author expands on the lessons deep-time can teach us. VERDICT Halliday's brilliantly imaginative reconstructions, his deft marshalling of complex science, offers a thrilling experience of deep-time nature for pop-science buffs.--Robert Eagan

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2022
A tour of the past worlds that the geological history of Earth reveals. British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Halliday roams the globe to examine the geological maxim that Earth's past is its present and future--that the processes that once placed the continents into a single supermass will do so again. He begins along the banks of the Thames, which "now enters the sea more than 100 miles south of where it used to flow" thanks to changing sea levels in times of glaciation and glacial melt: Britain was once a tropical swamp. The author recognizes that geologic time is mind-boggling given a record of life that stretches back 4 billion years and a planet another half-billion years older than that. He takes pains, therefore, to write with clarity about what is "directly observable from the fossil record," allowing for a few alternate theories and surprises. One of the latter is his observation that grasses are only 70 million years old, meaning that grassland animals are younger than that. He chronicles his travels to oddball geological places such as Italy's Gargano Peninsula, which really belongs out in the middle of the ocean and which was populated "over the water, with ancestrally small animals--mice and dormice, for example, blown across on bits of floating plant, and birds flying over." The monkeys that made their ways from Africa to South America had a tougher journey, crossing more than 1,000 miles of sea long after the continents broke apart 140 million years ago. Halliday brings good news: After periods of mass extinction come mass flourishing: "A new age begins, with new gods, and new worlds. After death, life; after extinction, speciation." The bad news: Humans are likely toast all the same. A bracing pleasure for Earth-science buffs and readers interested in diving into deep history.

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